All posts tagged lloyds banking group

Earlier today I returned from a short visit to family in Scotland, where the sports pages are full of tales of woe (depending on your view) concerning the financial plight of Glasgow Rangers.

The famous club – one half of one of the planet’s most intense footballing rivalries – is £25m in debt and seeking a new owner after the departure of tycoon Sir David Murray as chairman.

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Walter Smith – current manager and a full-blown Rangers legend, as they say – said at the weekend that the club is now effectively being run by Lloyds banking group.

“Now the bank have taken over the running of the club, they’ll have their own ideas and obviously investment isn’t one of them,” Smith said. “I just think there’s a stagnation about our club at the present moment.”

The bank denies ever having threatened the club with administration, although it is understood that they are trying to force Rangers to live within its means and to cut costs. Lloyds holds all the red cards; you might say it effectively owns the club.

And who owns Lloyds? The government, of course, led by one Gordon Brown.

This row at Rangers is an exceptionally interesting development, especially considering the footballing proclivities of the PM. Brown has long maintained that he is a supporter of the lowly Raith Rovers from Fife but it has long been suspected in some quarters that this is just convenient cover for his ‘blue-nose’ tendencies.

In Scotland, sports editors, civic leaders and politicians will go to extraordinary lengths to pretend in public that they do not support either Celtic or Rangers if they are trying to cultivate a reasonable image. Usually, they claim to back minnows such as St. Mirren (from Paisley) or Partick Thistle (located in Maryhill, Glasgow) but Brown used his Fife connection to work up a far more elaborate disguise. He even goes as far as attending Raith Rovers’ games, which must be absolute torture for a real football fan such as the PM.

Of course, there will be Rangers fans who fear that Brown’s tangential involvement in the ownership of the club (owning the bank that all but owns the club) might tempt him to get involved in team selection and buying and selling on the market. His record in these areas, beyond football and stretching into cabinet reshuffles and the sale of gold stocks, is highly mixed and the subject of much dispute.

It is certainly possible to understand why fans might fear that the Gers will be jinxed. Watch this space.